The BBC: how the voice of an empire became part of an evolving world

In the sixth of our in-depth nine-part series on the past, present and future of the corporation, Charlotte Higgins looks at how it became a news outlet that was trusted internationally but now faces fundamental questions about its purpose

Time was once a rough and ready thing to be marked by the movements of the sun and the vagaries of the church clock. But as the 19th century matured, the electrical telegraph and the alarm clock became the new, efficient keepers of time, regulating the railways and awakening commuters. From 1922 these technologies were joined by a yet more powerful force: the BBC. The Greenwich time signal – the “pips” – was devised by the corporation’s first director general, John Reith, and the then astronomer royal, Frank Watson Dyson, and first broadcast on 5 February 1924. With the soaring of wireless sales through the 1920s and 1930s, the populace became synchronised to itself as never before. Time, no longer a casual, ambling thing, fell into regimented step. As the BBC’s transmitters – those pencil-sharp towers of modernist promise – gradually cast their skein of radio signals across the UK, so the nation itself was transformed into a kind of timepiece.

The United Kingdom as we know it now was born in December 1922, when Northern Ireland seceded from the Irish Free State; it was that same month that the British Broadcasting Company began its operations. A decade later, in 1932, the BBC started to broadcast on shortwave to the empire. (The service was introduced by Reith in a manner utterly out of joint with our own era’s taste for hyperbole: “Don’t expect too much in the early days. The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good.”)

The sound of Big Ben striking was one of the most popular features enjoyed by British subjects overseas during the 1930s, hooking the empire’s dispersed peoples into a single time frame: you might have been in the outback, but Greenwich Mean Time was what mattered. Emma Robertson, a historian of the World Service, has written of a letter, published in an early edition of the journal World Radio, whose writer had reset the domestic clock to GMT better to catch the BBC schedule. This was in Malaysia.

The BBC thus bound nationhood and time together. It also changed the nature of space – for it banished distance. “The crofter in the north of Scotland” and “the agricultural labourer in the west of England” could together hear “the king speak on some great national occasion”, wrote Reith in his 1924 book Broadcast Over Britain.

A nation bound in one time frame

There are still times when we together cleave to the BBC as a nation bound in one time frame to communal experience. Two summers ago the Olympics saw millions of us cheering for Team GB via the BBC. We come together for the best of Saturday-night entertainment such as Strictly Come Dancing, for the most hotly awaited drama such as Sherlock, for significant political or royal moments (20 million tuned into the BBC’s coverage of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge). The BBC remains a crucial carrier of British identity: it binds us recognisably to ourselves and, in a phrase that would have baffled Reith, it is perhaps the greatest British export brand. Within Britain, when so many national industries and services (the National Coal Board, British Steel, British Rail, Royal Mail) have been privatised, it stands alongside the NHS and our great national museums as one of a dwindling number of institutions held in common in a non-commercialised civic space for the benefit of all. Tony Hall, the BBC director general, put it this way: the BBC conducts “a sense of what British creativity is and how Britain expresses itself to itself … We are part of what makes Britain Britain, and all the eddies and currents that make up Britain flow right through the BBC.”

But just as ideas of Britain and Britishness are coming under strain, so too this 90-year age of broadcast simultaneity is passing, or at least significantly changing its nature, in the face of the proliferation of broadcasters and channels, and the rise of the catch-up service, Twitter and the live blog. This year also marks a turning point for the way that the BBC carries notions of Britishness, both beyond and within these shores.

There are two great changes afoot. One has already taken place almost unremarked and undebated by the general public; another has been deemed too sensitive to be discussed openly by the corporation itself. The first is that as of 1 April 2014 the Foreign Office ceased to fund the World Service – the radio, and now television and online news and cultural service that the BBC provides to audiences overseas, for decades an expression, albeit an editorially independent one, of British “soft power” in often sensitive territories. In future the £245m bill will be borne by licence-fee payers. For many, the change seemed nothing more than an apparent administrative nicety. In fact, it raises important questions about the nature and purpose of broadcasting to overseas audiences.

The second is the Scottish independence referendum on 18 September. A yes vote would result, according to SNP policy, in the severing of BBC Scotland from the rump of the corporation and the establishing of a Scottish Broadcasting Service. But even a no vote should (many argue) challenge the BBC to examine afresh how successfully it relates to the constituent parts of the UK – and whether a more flexible, less monolithic notion of the future of the corporation ought to be embraced.

The BBC’s Atlantic Relay Earth Station on Ascension Island, 1,000 miles off the coast of Africa, was built in 1965. Photograph: BBC

In most parts of the world – with the exception of certain countries, including China, where its shortwave transmissions are jammed and its website restricted – you will not be far from the BBC (nor, these days, from other global broadcasters such as Russia Today, al-Jazeera, CNN and China’s CCTV). There is the BBC website. There are the formats, programmes and channels (such as BBC Earth, BBC Lifestyle, CBeebies) that are sold around the globe by Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm. Strictly Come Dancing, or Dancing With the Stars as it is known elsewhere, is the most popular format, running in 50 overseas versions. The most popular programme overseas, exported in its original form, is Top Gear, followed by Doctor Who and Sherlock (a roll call that gives pause for thought about the view of Britishness BBC television is exporting). There is the BBC World News channel, available in 200 countries. And there is the World Service, with radio in 28 languages and free-to-air TV in nine languages.

The World Service – until 1965 known as the External Services or General Overseas Service – is the offspring of two distinct streams in the early BBC: its English-language Empire Service, and the slightly later foreign-language services that began in 1938. The Empire Service was an address to the white ruling class, a way of bringing to scattered listeners the sounds of home – and the imaginative tools to inwardly reconstruct its landscapes, too. A poem published in the World Radio Journal of 1932 put it this way:

… Fancy, thus prompted by swift-winged sound,

Shall build you fairy pictures in the air

Of Thames and Tweed, of mountains heather-crowned,

Of Sussex windmills whitening in the sun,

Fens grey with rain, green meadows, furrows dun

And London, with the Empire’s House of Prayer …

Or as George V rather dramatically put it in an Empire Service Christmas address, it was “for men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea that only voices out of the air can reach them”. Despite the good intentions and efforts of some BBC executives, the traffic of sound was mostly one way – from Britain and, specifically, London, to the dominions.

Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret making a broadcast to the children of the empire during the second world war. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Foreign-language broadcasts were a direct response to the rise of shortwave transmissions from Germany and Italy, the fascist regimes there having quickly identified the power of the wireless as a propaganda tool. On the Italian side, Mussolini was broadcasting into the Middle East – a region thick with British interests – from Bari. In 1935, when Reith spoke to the Ullswater parliamentary committee, there was generalised disbelief that the German government should be subsidising propaganda broadcasting to the tune of £3m.

He told the committee: “The sort of thing they do which would lend colour to such a figure is the turning out of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the middle of the night to play to parts of the British Empire.” Lord Ullswater replied: “You mean they keep them sitting up?” Reith drily affirmed that this was indeed the case. The British government needed to catch up.

As war loomed, the BBC’s Arabic Service was established, then Portuguese and Spanish services for Latin America, then, by the time of the Munich crisis, German, Italian and French. The purpose of these broadcasts was quite different from that of the Empire Service. According to the historian Alban Webb, for the first time the BBC was “not making the assumption that listeners have the same view as it. It was talking to people with different, and sometimes opposing, views. It was trying to manage the perception of Britain through radio.”

The BBC was transformed by the war, in all kinds of ways: its staff doubled and its news operation ascended to new levels as listeners demanded the kind of here-and-now, on-the-ground relationship with events that could be only partially satisfied by newspapers. It also fought its own battles of the airwaves: by 1943 it was, with government funding, broadcasting in 45 languages.

‘The most powerful instrument of political warfare in the world’

Charles Rolo, a British-born, American-domiciled journalist who would go on to become literary editor of the Atlantic, wrote a slim volume called Radio War (1943). Radio, he wrote, “has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. More flexible in use and infinitely stronger in emotional impact than the printed world, as a weapon of war waged psychologically radio has no equal.”

In the psychological warfare conducted by the BBC, its great weapon was the truth – which is neither as simple nor as pious as it sounds. Truth became a formidable force, skilfully deployed, difficult to combat by the enemy. According to Webb: “The truth can be self-flagellation, government-bashing, and admitting failure. But admitting failure gives you more strength, and that is what Goebbels didn’t get, and that’s what the BBC learns in the war. And the BBC also learns that if you keep doing that, so if there’s a consistency in the way you report failure and problems, then you end up with even more credibility.” By the time decisive allied victories such as El Alamein and Stalingrad finally came, the BBC had built up enough trust for its accounts of them to be believed.

In Human Voices, her elegant novel about the wartime BBC (where she herself worked), Penelope Fitzgerald put it like this: “Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that the truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective.”

The BBC, she wrote, was “scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe”. Fitzgerald was too sly a novelist to write without ambiguity. Human voices are just that: human, and therefore fallible. She compared the truthfulness of the BBC to that of the Delphic Oracle – notorious for locking the truth inside slanted speech.

Still, for the BBC, truth was its strongest calling card. Tangye Lean, brother of the filmmaker David, who was director of External Services during the war, wrote in his book Voices in the Darkness (1943) of a letter published in 1942 by Goebbels, supposedly having been sent to him from a frontline soldier. The letter analysed “the motives inspiring the BBC’s apparent preference for the truth”. What Britain counted on was “the slogan already spread abroad before the war, and unfortunately one which had become a fixed conception about the decency and ‘fair play’ of the English”. The notorious truthfulness of the BBC had morphed almost into a national characteristic.

Towards the end of the war, much soul-searching occurred at the BBC about the future of its overseas broadcasting. Even before the onset of the cold war, the government saw the value of continuing directly to fund it in what was likely to be a scenario of postwar “disturbance”, while the BBC was anxious about the danger of political interference in its broadcasting agenda, unprotected as it was by the added distance from the state provided by the licence fee.

Editorial influence v geopolitical interests

From the end of the war until Foreign Office funding for the World Service ceased this spring, there was a continuing negotiation between the BBC’s “notions of editorial integrity and independence on the one hand, and the desire to exert influence over programme-making to bring it in line with British geopolitical interests, on the other”, in the words of Webb in London Calling, his new history of the World Service during the cold war.

Sir John Tusa, managing director of the World Service from 1986 to 1993, described his relationship with the Foreign Office as “a rather sophisticated quadrille: they knew perfectly well that if they were ever seen to be directing or shaping World Service output it would undermine the whole basis of its credibility and authority worldwide”.

What of the World Service now? Peter Horrocks, its current head, envisions a modern service that is more about exchange and reciprocity than the old metropolitan idea of wisdom radiating into the world from Bush House. Increasingly, locally based, bilingual journalists are bringing fresh insight to stories for the World Service, and they are enriching the BBC’s news operation as a whole – Kenyan Anne Soy, for example, who reported on the Westgate shopping mall shootings in Nairobi last year; or Nomsa Maseko, a South African journalist who, on the day Nelson Mandela died, movingly recalled her own memories of when he was set free.

This approach in turn, Horrocks told me, might be seen as reflecting a modern sense of Britishness: one that is less white than hitherto; one that is more porously open to world influence; one that looks a little more like what one might actually see in the streets of that world city London.

But there remain many questions. Absorption into licence-fee funding will increase pressure on it; Somali and Kirundi services (for example) will have to fight their corner against domestic output rather than being protected by a government soft-power agenda (though the BBC will still need a Foreign Office sign-off to wholly cut, or indeed introduce, an entire language service). Licence-fee payers may argue there is nothing much in it for them when the BBC supports Hausa broadcasts; and yet moves towards a more commercially aware, advertising-friendly World Service have also caused disquiet.

Allan Little worries that the regard with which the World Service is held internationally is not understood in Britain. Photograph: BBC Picture Publicity

Allan Little has been a BBC foreign correspondent in many countries. He talks of Freetown during the Sierra Leonian civil war, seeing the whole of Siaka Stevens Street stop dead as people crowded “in every doorway, on every market stall” round transistors to hear the World Service’s Focus on Africa. He remembers the elderly Jewish man in Paris who agreed to give him an interview because as a boy in hiding in wartime Poland the BBC was the only way he knew to keep on hoping; he remembers the old independence fighter in Zimbabwe who “hated the British” yet “in secret when he wanted to know what was happening in the world he said, ‘We listened to you and we trusted you.’” He regards the trust placed in the World Service and the BBC, fiercely guarded across the world and over generations, as a kind of covenant.

He says: “What a legacy. What an inheritance. I worry that this is not understood in Britain by the licence-fee payer who just reads how crap the BBC is every day in the papers. I worry especially now that the World Service is funded by the licence fee and has to take its chances alongside the ballgowns of Strictly Come Dancing and the special effects in Doctor Who.”

Little and I were talking in a cafe in Edinburgh, where he is covering the Scottish referendum. The BBC is in a delicate position. Its own institutional fate is intimately bound up with the fate of the union. And, unlike any other organisation that could be divided in the case of a yes vote on 18 September, it is also charged with reflecting and reporting the referendum campaigns impartially. The BBC has reacted to that problem by declining to comment on or discuss any potential breakup of the corporation, even in private – there is no documentation that could be subject to a freedom of information request.

Even so, some in Scotland believe that the BBC’s very nature, as a pan-British broadcaster, hampers its attempts to report fairly the events that could lead to its own transformation. For others, it is more the case that knowledge of the Scottish situation varies wildly between individual journalists. Indeed, there are those within the BBC in Scotland who complain of a lack of understanding from colleagues in London: a certain failure of imagination in grasping the emotions and arguments of the yes campaign, even a slight sneer creeping into the voice when the yes camp is discussed.

The relationship between the BBC and the UK at large has never been uncontested or straightforward. Of Scottish audiences, only 48%, according to the BBC Trust, believe that the BBC is good at representing the life of their nation (as opposed to 50% of Northern Irish, 53% of Welsh and 58% of English). Since 1922 the BBC has had an especially careful path to tread in Northern Ireland. Former Channel 5 chief and licence-fee sceptic David Elstein compares the great buildings established by the BBC outside London – the new MediaCity HQ in Salford; Pacific Quay, the great David Chipperfield glass-and-sandstone box on the Clyde in Glasgow – to the castles thrown up by Edward I in Wales. Be they imperial fortresses or not, they are also projections of certain kinds of modernity.

Peter Salmon, head of BBC North, told me that he had visited California tech companies to seek inspiration for the Salford building. “We wanted the place to be very obviously a BBC building, you know, full of BBC values but to feel like it was a younger media company with the colour schemes and the collaboration areas and the kitchens, and the use of space, and the use of technology.” Salmon was dazzled by the Google offices, but those of Pixar were the closest exemplar: “I loved the feel, I loved the way it felt non-hierarchical. I loved the sense of creatives as heroes, as it were, with a creative mission that everybody seemed to share.”

Pacific Quay, BBC Scotland's television and radio studio complex in Glasgow which opened in 2007. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The Pacific Quay building in Glasgow is a simple design with sandstone-built studios stacked in the centre of a vast toplit box edged with offices. The feeling is calm and austere. Reith’s imposing, 18th-century clawfoot desk strikes a curious note, a grand old object stranded amid the defiantly new, its leather-covered surface indented with the stains left by the first DG’s tea cups. It stands near the workstation of Ken MacQuarrie, the controller of BBC Scotland. From the window you can just see the square towers of the church where Reith’s father preached. You can also see the imposing Finnieston crane, once used for loading locomotives on to ships for export, now retained as a symbol of the Clyde’s heritage.

The BBC is the new industry for this patch of Glasgow. But it is a little lonely. Despite the new hotel being thrown up alongside it (soon, no doubt, to be filled with visiting BBC staff), despite the scattering of digital businesses around it, the recession has put paid, for now at least, to the bustling townscape that was to have accompanied it. The BBC buildings at Salford and at Pacific Quay are not just offices and studios but tools, more or less successful, of post-industrial urban regeneration.

The early BBC contains a story of the waxing and waning of the power of its non-metropolitan stations. In the early days local and relay stations – in places such as Stoke, Hull and Nottingham – broadcast their own services, a distant precursor to the BBC local radio networks established in the late 1960s. But as the building of high-power transmitters enabled London to broadcast nationally, the local services were swept up into larger, tidier regional schemes, providing listeners with an “alternative programme” to that on the national service. The essential move, according to Asa Briggs’ history of the BBC, was towards metropolitanism. “The BBC was following all the other mass media of the early 20th century in bolstering London’s supremacy, and the proud ‘provincialism’ of the Victorian age, already in tatters in many parts of the country, continued to fade unlamented until long after the second world war.”

Reporting on conditions in the “provinces” in 1936, Charles Siepmann, the BBC’s head of talks, urged against over-centralisation, noting that “the provinces are the seed ground of talent”.

The following year, one of the great early women of the BBC, Olive Shapley, who had begun work for the corporation in Manchester in 1935, was given access to one of the first mobile broadcasting units, a 27ft truck that toddled along at a maximum speed of 20mph. Her first programme made on the road was called £sd: A Study in Shopping. “We caused a sensation when we parked the thing in Sowerby Bridge. I, feeling an utter fool and holding a microphone at the end of a long lead … recorded a conversation between a shop assistant and a millworker … In a humble way, I think we were making broadcasting history,” she recalled in her memoir. “For a year or two I lived a strange life, in the cabs of long-distance lorries, down coal mines, in dosshouses, on longboats on the canals … nothing could stop me.”

Her efforts to describe the warp and weft of northern life were not always well-received. In 1939 she made a series called Canal Journey, interviewing men and women working on the Leeds-Liverpool waterway. She recalled that the Listener radio critic complained of “obscure dialect” that was “downright unintelligible”; the writer was “prepared to swear that very few Londoners understood more than one word in six”. Shapley remembered thinking: “So much for bringing the voice of the people to the nation!”

In Scotland, you do not have to talk to many people about the BBC before you hear a note of exasperation. There is clearly a great deal of passionate love for the BBC – enough for the Scottish National party’s white paper on independence to feel the need to reassure voters that “programmes like EastEnders, Doctor Who, and Strictly Come Dancing and channels like CBeebies, will still be available in Scotland”.

But people both within and beyond the BBC spoke to me – off the record, for this is a tender time as the corporation reports the road to the referendum – of decades-long frustration, despite a number of concerted efforts by the BBC to improve, in its news coverage, its feeling for national difference. Scots told me of waking up to headlines on nurses’ pay – except in Scotland it was different. Of teachers strikes “across the country” – except in Scotland it was different. Of legal matters, of the NHS, of cigarette packaging, of local elections. Except in Scotland, it was different. The inverse was also true: serious events in Scotland were, it was felt, under-represented on the national bulletins.

As far back as 1944, a pamphlet, published in the runup to charter renewal by the Saltire Society, urged that “revenue from Scottish licence fees” should be “spent in Scotland”; and demanded the development of an “enlightened and stimulating Scottish Broadcasting Service … what we have aimed at is best described, perhaps, as a Broadcasting Service with frequent international contacts, initiated from Scotland and designed to meet the needs and wishes of Scottish listeners”. Not a million miles away from what is now being proposed by the yes campaign.

Scotland at six

The sense of dislocation was only increased when Scotland gained a devolved parliament in 1998. With colleagues, the then head of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, devised the notion of a Scottish Six O’Clock TV news bulletin. It would run for an hour, replacing the regional bulletin, Reporting Scotland, which started at 6.30pm. In Queen Margaret Drive, the old Glasgow HQ, it didn’t feel like an especially radical move: after all, the nation had its own news bulletins on BBC Radio Scotland. And there would be a fresh news agenda provided by Holyrood. There would be some tweaks to the running order and a consolidation of news concerning Scotland. Viewers had found it especially irritating, for example, when a Scottish story that had been low down the running order in the British bulletin was the lead five minutes later on Reporting Scotland. The notion was to keep the 1pm and 9pm programmes untouched: the 6pm had always been weighted towards domestic news.

The Broadcasting Council for Scotland, which provided audience feedback from the nation to the governors, and the impeccably establishment Norman Drummond, a Church of Scotland minister and the BBC governor for Scotland, were strongly in favour of the idea. The governors as a whole were divided, with the chair, Sir Christopher Bland, keeping his cards close to his chest. The director Sir Richard Eyre, then a governor, was pro. He recalls: “[The DG] John Birt’s thesis was that BBC was a crucial binding agent in making Great Britain great. My view – I’d lived in Scotland for six years – was that it was the opposite. I think it’s incredibly divisive and you only have to spend a bit of time in Scotland to realise that the BBC is regarded as English broadcasting and those feelings run very, very deep. I said you could achieve a very clever piece of politics by enfranchising a Scottish News at Six.”

Birt was utterly opposed to the Scottish Six. In his memoir, The Harder Path, he describes the episode as “a bitter battle to prevent the BBC being split apart by the fissiparous forces of devolution”. The Scottish Six risked the unity of the BBC, and in turn of Britain itself. The Six would be the thin end of the wedge.

“I was deeply resistant to the proposal. It could have dire consequences for the BBC and unintended consequences for the United Kingdom … once the Six was conceded there would be no argument for resisting the takeover of the One and the Nine as well. Within a few years there would be no UK-wide news on the BBC. I calculated that this domino effect would continue, with a momentum of its own, until eventually the BBC itself was either turned into a weak, federal institution – each part going its own way – or was broken up, with an English Broadcasting Corporation headquartered in London.”

Arguments were spat forth over October and November 1998. There was horror when a document on news strategy was published – with no mention of a potential Scottish Six – before the governors had taken their decision. It looked like a stitch-up, a fait accompli. The splash in the Daily Record for 26 November 1998 read: “Wanted: for the cold-blooded murder of Scotland’s own news programme.” There were mugshots of the BBC executives concerned – including that of Tony Hall, now the director general, then the head of news.

Former director general John Birt was opposed to the idea of a Scottish News at Six. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

What really disturbed some in BBC Scotland, though, emerged only in Birt’s memoir of 2002: the director general had made a direct approach to the prime minister, Tony Blair, to keep the powerful cohort of Scottish Labour MPs on side. A Scottish Six would “encourage separatist tendencies”, Birt argued. Blair agreed, and asked Peter Mandelson to marshal Labour’s forces; later James Purnell, then an adviser at No 10, and now the BBC’s director of strategy and digital, took on the task. A decade and a half later, Birt’s appeal to the government still hurts and bewilders those who were involved in the Scottish Six plans – BBC loyalists whose intention was not to threaten the institution but to improve its service for its audience.

Bland, at the time pleading compromise, now sounds implacable on the argument. “The idea that there’s a Scottish view of the war in Kosovo or the Afghanistan war is just nonsense,” he said. “It would be hugely expensive, totally pointless and just satisfying a foolish wish for a tartan-badged news.”

Looking towards a potential yes vote, he said: “If it’s genuinely to be a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation with a Scottish licence fee and Scottish audience, it will be strapped for cash and talent. The Scots benefit, as do the Welsh and the Northern Irish, as do we all, from a unified and strong organisation because of the importance of scale. You can’t afford four separate newsrooms. You just can’t.”

Needless to say, that is not the view of those behind the SNP’s white paper on the future of Scotland. The SNP’s vision is of a Scottish Broadcasting Service built on Scotland’s share of the licence fee and a proportionate share of BBC Worldwide profits. Viewers would be better off than they are now because, according to the SNP’s figures, they would have twice the income as the sum currently spent by the BBC in Scotland (£345m a year as opposed to £175m). Under a joint venture with the BBC, Scottish audiences would continue to receive BBC channels and services in exchange for programming created in Scotland. The SBS would also create a new TV channel and radio network. The SNP looks towards Germany, with its federalised, regional broadcasters, or Denmark, with its successful recent stint of drama export hits, with enthusiasm.

This negotiating position hangs in the air: there is no sign that the BBC accepts the SNP’s figures, or would be willing to embark on a joint venture, or would regard Scottish productions River City and Shetland as a fair “swap” for EastEnders and Strictly. Notions of independence from government, constitution and regulation are also, as yet, only lightly sketched in. Meanwhile, staff at BBC Scotland nervously await their fates. The white paper states that the SBS would be “initially” founded on the staff and assets of BBC Scotland.

How the BBC responds, however, is a crucial question – not just for the population of Scotland, but for everyone in the UK. And its actions will go beyond narrow questions of broadcasting policy and into the realms of nationhood and identity.

As Philip Schlesinger, professor in cultural policy at Glasgow University, asks: “In the event of independence, do you want a fracture that’s a deep cultural fracture, where you suddenly turn people into strangers? Would the BBC pass on the chance of keeping some sort of over-arching British culture – some shared reference points – within these islands … Were I an enlightened politician in London, and was thinking long term, I’d say: ‘Right, there is this political change in the UK, but the links between Scotland and the rest of the UK are going to remain extraordinarily deep and continuous, whatever the change of political status. So what do we want? Do we want a certain kind of commonality across the border? ... You could stamp your foot for a couple of hundred million and make things very difficult or you could say: ‘Let’s try to make this work.’”

For the BBC, existential questions will loom large whatever the outcome on 18 September – more urgently, indeed, than for many other British institutions, for its role as a public symbol and international carrier of Britishness is of such prime importance. In the event of a political decoupling, the corporation will have the opportunity to make of its northern neighbours foreigners – or continue to carry shared cultural values either side of the border. If the union continues, and current predictions suggest that it will survive, but only narrowly, the challenge may be just as great. The BBC will have to prove more than ever that it can express multiple and interlocking identities through all parts of the UK with suppleness, sensitivity and understanding.